Studio: international art (3.1894)

Woodctit Printing in Water-Colours

a very valuable paper, lately issued from the United
States Government Printing House, Washington,
may supplement Mr. Eida's information, especially
as the work in question is not for general sale.

Through the kindness of Mr. Tokuno, Chief of
the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in the

FROM- A WOODCUT AFTER OKIO

Ministry of Finance, Tokio, the United States
National Museum has received (as a gift from the
Imperial Government of Japan) the complete outfit
of a Japanese woodcutting and woodcut printing
establishment, with fully illustrated descriptions of
the tools, materials, and processes.

Mr. Tokuno has further supplemented these
descriptions in his replies to many questions

addressed him by Mr. S. B. Koehler, the curator
of the museum ; who in the above-mentioned
pamphlet has embodied what he claims to
be the first authoritative information made on
this subject by a native of Japan thoroughly
qualified for the task. The notes added by Mr.
Koehler, and his very instructive comparison of
the older European methods of woodcutting and
printing with those employed in Japan, make the
work, small though its compass be, an almost
exhaustive monograph on the subject.

Here the intention is to note merely those
matters which affect experimental efforts to found
a school of coloured woodcuts in Europe. Based
on Japanese methods, but not necessarily imitative
in the effects produced, or in many details of the
process, it is possible that a new school of artistic
prints is growing up in Europe to-day. Examples
by MM. Lepere and Riviere, &c, shown lately in
Paris and London, and others, less known, produced
in England by M. Lucien Pissaro, Mr. Edgar
Wilson, and Mr. J. D. Batten, prove that the craft
has vitality strong enough to inspire European
artists to develop a convention of printing in
water-colours, that may, one day, take its place
with etching, mezzotint, lithography, and those
reproductive arts peculiarly under control of the
artist himself.

With this end in view, we may dismiss briefly
the somewhat elaborate catalogue of tools; noting
merely that a single knife, always of the same
pattern and size, whether used for the finest or
coarsest work, is employed for the actual cutting
of the design ; all the rest are for removing all the
superfluous wood, and for corrections in the block.

Nor need one dwell on the description of the
preparation of the drawing, which for the key
design in black is pasted face downwards on the
prepared block; from this plate impressions,
coloured by hand, are employed in like manner in
the preparation of the colour blocks. The aim of
the woodcutter, however, may be quoted:—"The
important point," Mr. Tokuno says, " to be kept
in view in characteristic Japanese woodcutting is
to show the direction of the brush in painting, so
as not to destroy the features of an original picture,
or of written characters. The direction in which
the knife is used might be said to be almost
identical with the direction of the brush, and wood-
cuts by skilful hands show the exact features of the
originals, while, at the same time, they have a special
artistic character of their own."

It is needful to bear in mind that the Japanese
woodcutter works in the direction of the fibre

Ji3